Lowering the Battle Flag

It took a charged and contentious vote in the South Carolina legislature for the Confederate flag to be removed from the State House grounds.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN BAZEMORE / AP

Just after 10 A.M. on Friday morning, an honor guard of seven members of the South Carolina Highway Patrol marched across the lawn at the State House grounds to a small, fenced-in square, with a flagpole at its center. For the past fifteen years, the Confederate battle flag—the emblem of the side, in a bloody war, whose purpose was to preserve slavery in the South and to expand it in new states in the West—had flown from that pole. Before that, the battle flag had flown from the State House itself; it had been placed there in 1961, as Eugene Robinson has pointed out, “to resist the dismantling of Jim Crow segregation.” No more: as four of the troopers, who were both black and white, stood at the corners of the square, two walked in through a swinging gate, where the seventh trooper then stood facing them. One of them turned a crank, lowering the flag. A crowd of spectators had been gathering since early morning, and they began cheering. (Most of them did, anyway; a few were carrying their own Confederate flags, and probably a smaller number always will.) The two troopers each took one end of the flag, folded it, and then rolled it up like a scroll. The seventh trooper produced a white piece of string. One of the two folders looped it around the flag, which now looked quite small, and, when he had tied a knot, squeezed his fists in a small gesture signalling a job well done—as it was.

Governor Nikki Haley was waiting on the State House steps with other local politicians and community leaders, including the mayor of Charleston, Joe Riley, as the lead trooper handed the flag to the curator of the Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum, and people smiled and clapped, shook hands and hugged, and generally congratulated one another. Haley had been on the grounds hours earlier, according to the Charleston Post and Courier, and appeared remotely on “Today,” where she told Matt Lauer that this was “a great day in South Carolina.” (After taking office, she directed state executive employees to use that phrase as a standard greeting when answering the phone.) But she quickly added that it was one that had only come about because of an awful day, just over three weeks ago, when a man named Dylann Roof murdered nine people who had welcomed him into their Bible-study circle at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. (“I’m thinking of those nine people today,” Haley told Lauer.) Roof had claimed the Confederate flag as his emblem. When it was still flying at full staff at the State House (as it did every day, by law) the day after the murders, the truth that its past and present meanings were not so distant from each other became clearer, too. (On Friday, the F.B.I. said that Roof should never have been allowed to purchase the gun he used to kill those nine people—if not for a record-keeping error, he would have failed the background check.)

Haley, who in her reëlection campaign last year about the flag ("Over the last three and a half years, I spent a lot of my days on the phones with CEOs and recruiting jobs to this state. I can honestly say I have not had one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag."), appears to have worked hard to get it lowered. It took a vote in the state senate—where one of the shooting victims, Clementa Pinckney, had served—and another in the assembly before the flag could be taken down. Senators quickly passed the resolution to take down the flag, in a 37–3 vote, but in the assembly there was, it turned out, a real fight, when a small number of legislators tried to add amendments that would delay it, including one calling for a referendum. Representative J. Gary Simrill warned, according to the Times, that the removal of the flag was part of a larger, insidious, history-destroying project—“almost a cultural genocide.” It says something about the state of the South that what helped shame the legislators into getting the job done was a speech not by one of their black colleagues but by Representative Jenny Anderson Horne, a descendant of Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy. Horne was recognized at around 8 P.M. Wednesday night, after hours of debate. “This flag offends my friend Mia McLeod, my friend John King, my friend Reverend Neal,” she said, pointing to her colleagues, and then she began to cry. "I cannot believe that we do not have the heart in this body to do something meaningful, such as take a symbol of hate off these grounds on Friday,” she said. She had attended Senator Pinckney’s funeral, and she added that, for his widow and his two daughters, any further delay would be “adding insult to injury, and I will not be a part of it!” She was shouting now. “I’m sorry, I have heard enough about heritage. I have a heritage”—she mentioned Davis, and said that what mattered was that the flag came down, "because this issue is not getting any better with age.”

After midnight, in the early hours of Thursday, the bill passed. Haley used thirteen pens to sign it, nine of which were set aside to give to the families of the nine victims. In her statement after the vote, Haley spoke of the decision as an act of grace, for which the state had been readied by the unbidden generosity of the murdered people’s relatives, who told Roof, at a preliminary hearing, that they forgave him, or believed that God could, if Roof let Him. Haley is not wrong about the indelible power of that gesture. But the families shouldn’t have had to make it; it shouldn’t have taken that.

And South Carolina, and the rest of us, are not done. A move in the U.S. Congress to keep Confederate flags out of military cemeteries looked so uncomfortably contentious that John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, used a parliamentary move to cut it short. He said that, instead, he’d put together a commission to look into the use of Confederate symbols in the Capitol. Those include statues of Jefferson Davis and John Calhoun, a politician who fought for slavery. (This isn’t just a federal problem; Maryland might want to do something about the statue of Roger Taney, the author of the Dred Scott decision, in front of its State House.) “I actually think it’s time for some adults here in the congress to actually sit down and have a conversation about how to address this issue,” Boehner said. He might want to talk to some of the adults-in-age-only in his party, like Representative Lynn Westmoreland, of Georgia, who claimed that the flag honored ordinary Confederate soldiers, the majority of whom, he said, "were people that were fighting for their states, and, you know, I don’t think they even had any thoughts about slavery.” It is ahistorical enough to say that the Confederate flag is not now related to slavery; but to suggest that it never really was, or that slavery’s relation to the war was a mystery to most Southerners, adds, as Horne put it, insult to injury. Lies like that do not get better with age.

Amy Davidson Sorkin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2014.